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BIO Anwar Motan October 2008 I was born in Karachi, Pakistan, eldest of the 10 children of Mohammad and Momin Motan. My parents migrated from a village called Jetpur in India, when India was divided into two nations, India and Pakistan in 1947. We are seventh generation Muslims, converted from Hindus with basic belief in oneness of God, five prayers per day, 2 ½% charity from savings every year, 30 days of fasting in Ramadan and once in lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca, if you can afford it. Karachi is the biggest town with over 30 miles of shoreline. British had built some nice beaches where I enjoyed my childhood. I played cricket and enjoyed swimming. My family was very poor and I had to start work at the age of 15. I started working on Lathe machines in a machine shop. When I was in 10th grade, a cousin of mine came to visit from US and he described the life in US…. a dream come true. Process was simple. I was supposed to take TOEFL (Test of English as a foreign language), apply for I-20 (Application for admission into a US college). Within weeks, I received VISA from US embassy in Karachi and I was ready to fly to US. It was the city of Chicago, where I landed and started my first college career in US. A friend of mine, Amin Fatani, introduced me to a French Chef. I started working at one of the finest restaurants on 95th floor of John Hancock center. College expenses were high and I could not stand the cold weather of Chicago. My two roommates and I decided to move to Houston, in August of 1973. University of Houston expenses were much lower than Chicago. I was admitted in the college of natural science and Mathematics. This is where I took my first Data processing course. UofH had IBM 360 and Honeywell 1108, time sharing systems. I was introduced with Datapoint Corporation where a friend of mine worked from college. I was hired on a temporary basis to help correct some of the issues with their Accounts receivable programs. In 1975, I got a job with Safeway stores, as a night stocker. I was also responsible to download ESLS (Extended store level scanning) files and apply the price changes. In October of 1977, during my last semester in school, I received a call from Dave Weierman, Data processing Manager in our Division office. He interviewed me over the phone and asked me to come and see him. This was the turn in my life, a real opportunity to start my career. Next day, I visited him and he offered me the job as junior programmer, working on RPG and Assembler. When my status changed to immigrant in US. In April of 1979, I flew back home after 7 long years and got engaged to my wife, Yasmin. We were married in November of the same year and came back to Houston. Our first child Shermeen was born day after Christmas of 1980. It was a wonderful blessing of God. With Dave, I learned from the scratch, from operations to data entry clerk to programming. He finally got me trained in CICS Systems programming and I became Senior Systems Programmer. During the time, my son Noumaan was born in June of 1983 and I lost four of my uncles to cancer in their forties. This got me moved to work for hospitals. I applied with Hospital Corporations of America (HCA). Within weeks, I was interviewed for a Project Lead position with King Faisal Hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. My family was very excited, lucrative salary, no taxes and 6 weeks of vacation each year, paid housing and travel tickets for the whole family every year. July of 1985, I started to work for the hospital for the first time. It was so much different than retail industry and had so much to learn. I started with the old IBM HCS package written in CICS COBOL, Macro and Command Level and DL/1 database. There were several Assembler routines. I wrote the fresh specs for the new ADT/Registration system and converted over to a menu driven CICS COBOL command level programs. It was a success and users loved it. This was just a start of assignments. We developed and re-wrote several clinical applications. Gulf war of 1990, changed the structure of IT in King Faisal hospital. We received several personalities, from Dr. Paul Clayton of Columbia, Dr. Dean Sittig of Vanderbilt, and Dr. Thomas Payne of University of Washington. It was a great learning experience for me in Clinical Information Architect. Internet was introduced in the hospital and I started training Physicians and residents on the usage. I became part of the Advisory committee for Advance technology planning. My kids finished their high schools in 1998 and we had done over forty trips of different parts of the world, we decided to come back home to Houston. Year 2000 issues were on the horizon and I was able to get a consulting position with RCG. This gave me an opportunity to work at Memorial Hermann hospital to verify their due diligence in year 2000 preparation. I knew, this was a temporary position and I was in search of a permanent position. I applied with Harris county in November of 1999 and I had forgotten about it, until I received a call from Louis Greak in March of 2000. I was interviewed for Application Support Manager position and I started in May of 2000. I started with Clinical systems and I was given additional responsibilities for Ancillary and Interfaces. Our biggest projects so far have been installation and implementation of multi million dollar projects: Radiology PACS, Speech recognition, Cardiology, Outpatient and Inpatient Pharmacies, EPIC Clinical systems and Pharmacy Cashiering Systems. We have been able to integrate most of the image modalities and Ancillary system results into our EPIC Clinical systems. |
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Here is the interview I just had with ImagingBiz - RADIOLOGY BUSINESS JOURNAL - Healthcare professionals can benefit from what we have achieved here at Harris County Hospital District (HCHD)
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